Quotes about policy
page 20

Julius Streicher photo
Hillary Clinton photo
J. Howard Moore photo

“Well may we be dazed by the horrific metamorphosis. Dark days are upon us. The pendulum of civilization trembles, as if to swing back to the inglorious twilight of the past. Imperialistic tendencies are laying their damning clutches on the unsuspecting form of the republic. Fearful questions confront us. Whether we are to be compelled henceforth to read with downcast gaze the matchless axioms of Jefferson and to mumble in confusion the heroic history of our dead—whether the Fourth of July is to be henceforth a day of embarrassment and shame instead of, as hitherto, an occasion for spontaneous and boundless pride—whether Yorktown and Monmouth are to become events which, instead of inspiring a continent to eulogy and song, shall provoke no higher eloquence than that which gutturals from the limping lips of apology—whether the political wisdom of the founders of the republic, gleaned in terrible hours, by anxious eyes, from the travail of ages past, shall be swept away by the heartless levity of upstart statesmen—whether, in short, we shall turn our backs inexorably upon the past—a past glorious achievement and unrivaled in precept—and become the wretched exemplars of a policy, ruinous to ourselves and to our children, repulsive to every truly civilized mind and destructive of the fairest hopes of humanity—these.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

are questions that assail with relentless emphasis the consciences of a great people.
"America's Apostasy", Chicago Chronicle, 6 Mar. 1899

Winston S. Churchill photo
Harry Truman photo

“Your old friend Congressman Hartley of the Taft Hartley team … has written a book … The title of this book is Our New National Labor Policy, the Taft-Hartley Act and the Next Steps.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Get that: "The Next Steps" … They're going even further! … The Republicans favor a minimum wage — the smaller the minimum the better.
Harry Truman at Akron (11 October 1948), Good Old Harry

Chris Hedges photo
James Madison photo
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead photo
Ramsay MacDonald photo
Ramsay MacDonald photo

“The channels of world trade are so obstructed by the pursuit of nationalist economic policy that steps should be taken at once to make it possible to arrive at an international economic agreement which would revive international trade. A return to free trade pure and simple would only increase unemployment.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the National Labour conference at Caxton Hall, London (28 October 1935), quoted in The Times (29 October 1935), p. 9
1930s

Ramsay MacDonald photo
Tony Benn photo
Tony Benn photo
Tony Benn photo
Slobodan Milošević photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Roy Jenkins photo

“I respect your right to put them to me. You will no doubt respect my right to tell you that I do not think all the points in sum amount to a basis for a rational penal policy.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Source: Speech to the Police Federation conference in Eastbourne (18 May 1976) regarding the Federation's campaign on law and order, quoted in The Times (19 May 1976), p. 5

Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Harold Wilson photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo

“We do agree with President Trump’s decision or proposal on the wall. The vast majority of potential immigrants do not have good intentions. They do not intend to do the best or do good to the US people. I would very much like the US to uphold the current immigration policy, because to a large extent we owe our democracy in the southern hemisphere to the United States.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In a Fox News interview on 18 March 2019. Bolsonaro backs Trump's border wall ahead of White House meeting https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/19/jair-bolsonaro-donald-trump-wall-immigration. The Guardian (19 March 2019).

Alfred Percy Sinnett photo
Tulsi Gabbard photo
Tulsi Gabbard photo
F. W. de Klerk photo
Enoch Powell photo
Enoch Powell photo
Alfred von Waldersee photo
Sheila Jackson Lee photo
Clement Attlee photo
Cyril Ramaphosa photo

“The manifesto had a paragraph on a wish and an aspiration, acknowledging that the Reserve Bank is independent and that there is no intention whatsoever to tamper or tinker with the independence of the central bank. The wish that is expressed is, that as it goes ahead with monetary policy machinations, it will keep an eye on employment.”

Cyril Ramaphosa (1952) 5th President of South Africa

Answering a question by JSE chairperson Nyembezi-Heita in Rosebank, on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, as quoted by Carien du Plessis in Ramaphosa and Magashule contradict each other on Reserve Bank nationalisation https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/politics/ramaphosa-and-magashule-contradict-each-other-on-reserve-bank-nationalisation/ar-BBSjJd5?ocid=spartanntp, Daily Maverick (17 January 2019)

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It has been thoughtfully observed that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of this knowledge. I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other or more ancient nationalities. Our seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here from all quarters of the globe, by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine right govern and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves, it would be unadvised to attempt to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or prescribe any on account of race, color or creed.
1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Henry Campbell-Bannerman photo
David Lloyd George photo
David Lloyd George photo
Anthony Eden photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo

“I are very concerned, however, to make sure there can be open and proper debate about Israel and its foreign policy, and about the future for Palestinian people. Hence there has to be that space for debate, you cannot shut that down. But it can never, ever be conducted in an anti-Semitic way.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Jeremy Corbyn condemns ex-Labour MP's comments in anti-Semitism row https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-45244081, BBC News, 20 August 2018
2010s, 2018

Daniel Ortega photo
Hendrik Verwoerd photo
Theresa May photo
Karl Dönitz photo
Adolf Eichmann photo
Gustav Stresemann photo

“It is the policy of force which finally will always triumph. But when one has not got the force, one can also combat by the idea.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Speech in Berlin (29 November 1924), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 330
1920s

Stanley Baldwin photo
Haris Silajdžić photo
Bret Stephens photo

“This is a presidency whose defining feature isn’t ideology, much less policy. It’s neurosis.”

Bret Stephens (1973) far-right American

"Trump Gives Conservatives Their Just Comeuppance" http://archive.is/bD7xJ (15 September 2017), The New York Times

Elizabeth Warren photo
Ahmad Sirhindi photo
Mark Satin photo

“The New World Alliance … was a short-lived precursor of the North American Greens. It was founded by Mark Satin (author of New Age Politics) after a nationwide Delphi-type survey among 500 academics, policy experts, and political activists interested in this emerging political paradigm. These new colleagues … were also exploring the relationship between personal and political transformation.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

"Preface." In Woolpert, Stephen; Slaton, Christa Daryl; and Schwerin, Edward W., eds. (1998), Transformational Politics: Theory, Study, and Practice. State University of New York Press, p. xi. ISBN 978-0-7914-3945-6. Woolpert had been a member of the Alliance, see p. xi, and Slaton had worked with the Greens, see McLaughlin quote below.
New Age and Green activism

Raghuram G. Rajan photo

“Mr Raghuram Rajan is an outstanding man who understands central banking. He is probably only one in the world among the crowds of professors at central banks that actually has a good grip on monetary policies and what you can or cannot achieve with them. He should get the Noble Prize in economics but the others are all money printers at heart, all of them.”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

Marc Faber, economist, as quoted in " Raghuram Rajan only central banker I trust, he should get Nobel in Economics: Marc Faber http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-12/news/65490521_1_marc-faber-rbi-governor-boom-doom-report", The Economic Times (12 August 2015)

Samuel T. Cohen photo

“As you can well imagine, any nuclear bombing study that neglected to target Moscow would be laughed out of the room. (That is, no study at that time; 10 or 15 years later senior policy officials were debating how good an idea this might be. If you wiped out the political leadership of the Soviet Union in the process, who would you deal with in arranging for a truce and who would be left to run the country after the war?) Consequently, two of RAND’s brightest mathematicians were assigned the task of determining, with the help of computers, in great detail, precisely what would happen to the city were a bomb of so many megatons dropped on it. It was truly a daunting task and called for devising a mathematical model unimaginably complex; one that would deal with the exact population distribution, the precise location of various industries and government agencies, the vulnerability of all the important structures to the bomb’s effects, etc., etc. However, these two guys were up to the task and toiled in the vineyards for some months, finally coming up with the results. Naturally, they were horrendous.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

Harold Mitchell, a medical doctor, an expert on human vulnerability to the H-bomb’s effects, told me when the study first began: “Why are they wasting their time going through all this shit? You know goddamned well that a bomb this big is going to blow the fucking city into the next county. What more do you have to know?” I had to agree with him.
F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy photo
V. V. Giri photo

“The former President of India, has made outstanding contributions towards designing and evolving labor policy in India. He was a champion of labor movement and a person who was largely responsible for ensuring that labor and employment issues figured prominently in all policy discussions relating to growth and development.”

V. V. Giri (1894–1980) Indian politician and 4th president of India

Mallikarjun Kharge in: Shri Mallikarjun Kharge Minister of Labour and Employment conferred the V.V. Giri Memorial Award 2009 on Prof. Ravi Srivastava of the Jawaharlal Nehru University http://www.pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=64546, Press Information Bureau, 10 August 2010

Chandra Shekhar photo
Chandra Shekhar photo
Chandra Shekhar photo

“I do not expect any problems to arise because we do not expect Mr. Chandra Shekhar to do anything that is inconsistent with Congress ideology and policies.”

Chandra Shekhar (1927–2007) Indian politician

Vithal Gadgil in: Sanjoy Hazarika "Rival of Singh Becomes India Premier"

After extending support to Shekahr to form the government.

Richard K. Morgan photo

“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference—the only difference in their eyes—between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.”

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 15 (pp. 184-185, quoting the fictional work Things I Should Have Learned by Now, Volume II, written by story character Quellcrist Falconer)

Rajinikanth photo
Sandra Fluke photo
Serge Lang photo
Bud Selig photo

“About the drug-testing policy.”

Bud Selig (1934) American baseball executive
Joachim von Ribbentrop photo

“A foreign minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) German general

Robert H. Jackson

“I think that Mr Rajaratnam has left an imprint on the Foreign Service of Singapore that it is a foreign policy of ideas.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

Professor Chan Heng Chee, Singapore Ambassador to the United States.

William Ewart Gladstone photo

“The rule of our policy is that nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort; and I am not aware that, either in its moral or even its literary aspects, the work of the state for education has as yet proved its superiority to the work of the religious bodies or of philanthropic individuals.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Even the economical considerations of materially augmented cost do not appear to be wholly trivial.
Source: Liberal Manifesto (September 1885) http://oll.libertyfund.org/EBooks/Smith_0306.pdf

Prem Rawat photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Steve Jobs photo
James P. Gray photo
James P. Gray photo
James P. Gray photo
James P. Gray photo

“[W]e will look back in astonishment that we allowed our former policy to persist for so long, much as we look back now at slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or the days when women were prohibited from voting.”

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

Source: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, 2011, p. 5

James P. Gray photo
Luis Alberto Urrea photo
Bernie Sanders photo

“Occasionally, it might be a good idea to be honest about American foreign policy.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

South Carolina democratic debate (25 February 2020), as quoted in CNN https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/2020-democratic-debate-south-carolina/h_2a3e527ba81bbe6e29e555687c031939
2010s, 2020

George Ball (diplomat) photo
Jimmy Carter photo

“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Remarks at a White House meeting commemorating the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (6 December 1978), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter, 1978 Book 1: January 1 to June 30, 1978, p. 2164
Presidency (1977–1981), 1978

Jacinda Ardern photo
Marianne Williamson photo
Nigel Farage photo
Olivier Blanchard photo
Stephen M. Walt photo

“Far from making ‘America great again,’ this epic policy failure will further tarnish the United States’ reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

Stephen M. Walt (1955) American political scientist

Quoted byJulian Borger in US awol from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/29/us-awol-from-world-stage-as-china-tries-on-global-leadership-for-size, Berger followed the quote with the words: Walt wrote in Foreign Policy, in a commentary titled “the death of American competence https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/23/death-american-competence-reputation-coronavirus/”, March 29, 2020

Ralph Nader photo
Tony Abbott photo

“I stand for active government, not big government. I stand for government which gets off people's backs, not government which opts out of the future because it cannot face hard decisions. I stand for government which backs Australia's families with real policies and not just platitudes.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

First speech of Tony Abbott to Australian Parliament https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%22chamber/hansardr/1994-05-31/0043%22, 1994.
First speech to Parliament

Billy Hughes photo

“He was sick of this canting humbug about internationalism. Nationalism, not internationalism, was the policy for Britain.”

Billy Hughes (1862–1952) Australian politician, seventh prime minister of Australia

Speech in Cardiff (20 July 1918), quoted in The Times (22 July 1918), p. 3

Richard D. Wolff photo
Richard D. Wolff photo
Shaun Chamberlin photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“We shall drink the cause of Liberalism all over the world. The reign of Metternich is over and the days of the Duke's policy might be measured by algebra, if not by arithmetic.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Henry Sulivan in response to the French Revolution of 1830 (1 August 1830), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (1970), p. 103
1830s

Arun Shourie photo